Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  Charlie and his girl started hitting up homes and units multiple times a week. We fell out of touch for about three months, then he showed up on my doorstep one night and asked to stay with me. I opened my door to him, as I always had. I came home from work the next day and it was clear the place had been tossed. Charlie called me and asked if the police were still there—I said they’d left. But to tell you the truth, I felt betrayed that he knew the cops had been there and he didn’t give me a heads-up.

  The DEA and the state Bureau of Investigation came back the next day and told me my friend was wanted for trafficking heroin, Molly, and meth, and for robbing storage units and homes. I acted shocked. They suggested that I could be implicated in the crimes if I didn’t help them track Charlie down. So I called him and told him I needed my fix even though it had been a while since I was regularly getting high—but I wanted to tip him off, so I called him by a nickname that we hadn’t used since high school. He picked up on it, I think, and he said something that has stayed with me to this day. He said, “Oh, man, I haven’t heard from you in forever.” And he said it a few times, as if he was trying to clear me, to make sure that the cops knew I didn’t have any part in this.

  It took a few tries—Charlie was always slick—but eventually, and with my help, the cops got him. I was with him that day. He pulled over in a Barnes & Noble parking lot to let me out, and he said, “Hey, it’s been good knowing ya.” I called the DEA agent and let him know where Charlie was heading, and they got him.

  He’s serving thirty years in prison. He’ll be sixtysomething when he gets out. I’ve always felt guilty about what I did, like I betrayed my own brother. But also kind of relieved. I couldn’t risk getting caught up in it. I am clean now—have been for over a year—and I see my daughter as often as I can. I have a good job. I feel like I got a second chance, so I’m trying not to throw it away. But, man, the past weighs on me.

  Raven, twenty-nine

  One of my earliest memories is of some guy pushing his way into our apartment, undoing his belt buckle, and sliding his jeans halfway down his legs as he handed my mother a fistful of cigarettes. This was my signal to go to the kitchen and return only once my mother had started smoking on our worn-out couch. Sometimes she would remember to call me back in. Most times, she forgot. I’d take little peeks through the opening that separated the kitchen from the rest of the apartment, so I saw a lot of things that I had no business seeing.

  Probably one of the first lessons I learned as a kid was that I couldn’t count on my mother to remember to feed me, to help with homework, or to wake me up for school. If I wanted to do any of that, it was up to me. And if I didn’t, well, that was up to me, too. I was always the adult. So, I’d remind her when we were running low on groceries and if we had the money, I’d throw in a small bag of Lay’s chips as a treat to myself while we waited in the checkout line. My favorite flavor was salt and vinegar because I liked the way the vinegar would make the sides of my mouth pruney.

  Most of all, though, I couldn’t count on my mom to protect me. I always had an eye on her. She needed taking care of, but when it most mattered, she wasn’t there to take care of me. So, it was only a matter of time before those men who were coming in and out of the apartment got their hands on me, too.

  My mom had me when she was seventeen. I had my own daughter when I was eighteen, a senior in high school. I wasn’t ready to be a mom. I still wanted to smoke and drink. I actually don’t think I ever wanted kids—I might have made a nice godparent, but that’s about it. My daughter’s father was sixteen or seventeen, a sophomore. He was studious and preppy, and he was holding down a job even then. He worked at a fast-food chain, and he was there when I called him and told him I was pregnant. In my high school, lots of girls got pregnant, so we didn’t really treat it like it was a big deal. I mean, it was common; we didn’t trip.

  I had my daughter and left her with her father. I had the opportunity to go off to college; my dad dropped me off with $100, and I didn’t hear anything from him for years. Turns out, he got locked up for seven years for selling drugs. He recently got paroled. I heard through other people that he took a deal to snitch on my uncle, who is also in the business. I’m not sure, though. We’re not in touch.

  Well, I never ended up graduating from college. I gave up somewhere along the way and decided, if I die tomorrow, I’m going to do what I wanna do today. And what I wanted to do was PCP. The first time I smoked PCP, I told myself that I was just experimenting and I’d stop whenever I wanted. It looked just like a cigarette, but it stank. Some guy sold it to me for $20 a pop. Soon enough, I was smoking two or three sherms a day, and I figured out that I could get it for $15 “if they liked me”—meaning, if I got on my knees and made it worth their while. And before I knew it, I’d become my mother—passed out on a couch, wetted out.

  Being on PCP is like being on a movie set, or like being on vacation. There’s a sense of lightness—a suspension of reality. I felt carefree, powerful, superhuman. Above it all. One night, after I’d smoked, I decided to walk from my apartment to the 7-Eleven on the corner for a Slurpee and some Cheetos. I saw three men standing outside one of the concrete buildings to my left. Then, one started running toward me. I felt like I was walking so quickly that we would collide. But then, as if someone had lassoed him, he stopped abruptly and fell to the ground. When I reached him, I looked down at him: his eyes were open, glassy. I didn’t feel anything at all. I looked back at the two other men. They were there, and then they weren’t. After standing over him for what could have been a second or half an hour, I kept walking to the 7-Eleven. I could have done something. I could have called an ambulance or given him CPR. Maybe I could have saved his life. But I was in video-game mode. Nothing sank in, nothing got to me.

  Actually, thinking back on this, I’m not even sure it’s a real memory. Maybe I hallucinated it.

  A large part of these years is very hazy, in between reality and dream world. I was doing what I needed to do to get to the next high, and not much else. To fuel my addiction, I started writing bad checks and stealing credit cards, and eventually it caught up with me. I was held at the county correctional facility for two weeks. I got through the detox, which was absolutely brutal. It’s like all the pain and shit you’ve been getting high to avoid gets dumped on you all at once. Then they moved me to an out-of-state prison for four months. I felt really unsafe there. I was around so many dope fiends, and people with hep C or HIV. My bunkmate was a fifty-two-year-old woman with a colostomy bag that she changed in the middle of the night. It smelled awful. When I was there, it was just about survival. Let me put it this way: you don’t hear any happy stories. Everybody’s got something they went through—someone beat them, someone didn’t love them, whatever. So you find someone whose something looks a little like yours, and you band together to get through it.

  When I got out, I went back to my old ways almost immediately. These were my days of turning tricks. I had a lot of stripper friends, and pretty soon, stripper logic started making a lot of sense to me. Basically, “If you’re going to fuck, don’t do it for free.” I started charging about $200 for thirty minutes, and slept with over one hundred people in a matter of two or three months. I used to think—it’ll be over soon, and then I can smoke and drink and be in control of my body again.

  I always used protection but, honestly, it was dirty business. The worst was this guy who was a big-time lawyer. He was in his fifties but didn’t look it at all—he barely looked a day over thirty. But he was fat and something about him gave off the impression that he was a slob. I think it was the way that he ate: sloppily, noisily, messily. His house was also absolutely disgusting. One time, we drank a whole fifth of Rémy and had sex. His penis was tiny; the condom didn’t even fit. He kept trying to kiss me, and it made my stomach turn over. Kissing is intimate, too intimate. People don’t know how to do it well, and you can’t have a protected kiss. But he was all over me, and I figured—what’s the point of re
sisting? The good thing about this particular guy was that he made me feel so demeaned that I stopped turning tricks. That experience messed with me. He was the last person I slept with for money. And once the money ran out, my drug habit did, too.

  I got myself together and got a job at a local chain restaurant. I’ve been promoted a bunch of times, up to managerial positions. It’s not my cup of tea—I mean, it’s definitely not what I had dreamed of doing with my life—but I can build from it. I met my girlfriend, who is very loving and supportive. I was attracted to her mind, and I fell in love with the person, not the gender. She helped rebuild me, which is a good thing, because I wasn’t a fan of the old me.

  The old me did a couple of friends dirty. I slept with their boyfriends and took money from them for sex. At the time, I was telling myself that I was doing them a favor: if a man doesn’t claim you by putting a ring on it, it’s fair game. The old me all but abandoned my daughter. Before her father won custody, she was being raised by strangers. He has had her for four years now. I see her every once in a while, but we never bonded. She’s better off. I spared her having to be raised by someone like me.

  I guess what’s really scary is how much the old me reminds me of my mother. I used to think back to when I saw her lying on that couch, unconscious, with a parade of men coming in and out of the apartment doing whatever they damn well pleased to me and her. I didn’t know better than to accept it as an okay life to live. That’s all I ever saw: drugged-out mother, jailed father. When that’s your starting point, how far can you really get in life? How much of a chance do you really stand?

  George, sixty-five

  I’m in my apartment for 95 percent of my life. I only go out for food and medicine, and that’s only if I can’t get it delivered, or if I need it urgently. When I do get food, I shop for the whole month. All in all, I usually end up having around eighty-five bags. I’ve had my car for nine years, and it only has about forty thousand miles on it. I’ve done the math, and that amounts to about twelve miles a day. On days that I don’t feel well, which is the vast majority of my days, that’s definitely an overestimate.

  I wash my clothes once or twice a year. This year—let’s see, it’s March—so I’ve only showered twice. The longest I’ve ever gone without a shower is ninety-six days. It’s usually the case that something triggers the shower, like cutting the grass or something like that. But I brush my teeth three times a day and I put deodorant on. I’m not really concerned about whether I smell, because I’m seldom around people. If company ever finds me, I keep my distance. But that’s rare, you know, and I’m okay with it because I don’t much like people. Plus, when I’m not feeling good, I don’t have the ability to make people laugh, and so I become very self-conscious and I isolate. The people who come to see me regularly in the last few years are my landlord (to pick up checks), and the delivery guy (to drop off food or packages, and pick up checks). Basically, all I’m good for is the money.

  I only eat off paper plates and drink from plastic cups. I try to reuse as much as I can, but I realize it’s wasteful. I don’t know what to do—if I used real plates, I don’t think I’d ever get around to washing them. I look around my apartment and it’s easy to become overwhelmed—the sink, the trash can, the kitchen counters, are all overflowing with stuff, garbage. In one corner of my living room, I’ve piled up cardboard boxes from mail deliveries. I keep the boxes in case I ever need to mail anything out—that way I don’t have to pay extra for packaging. Sometimes, I’ll go months without taking out the garbage, which is useful because I need all the Gatorade bottles I can get.

  When I go out to shop, I usually buy the thirty-two-ounce bottles of Gatorade that I then line up by my bed. Once I’m done drinking the Gatorade, I pee in the bottles so that I don’t have to get out of bed. Sometimes, I’m so depressed that I don’t get out of bed for weeks on end, and when I feel better, I notice that I’ve gotten bedsores.

  It was during one of the long stretches of depression that I ran out of free bottles, so I ended up peeing in a half-full orange-flavored bottle. Needless to say, I forgot about it the next day, and it took two full gulps for me to realize that I was drinking my own piss. Which, when you really think about it, is kind of funny. Or at least I thought it was.

  I don’t think I’m a hoarder. I’m not a hoarder. It’s hard to get around my apartment because there’s lots of garbage that I don’t throw out fast enough, but that’s not because I want to keep it. I mostly just can’t get up the courage to go down to the dumpster.

  I wasn’t always like this. I mean, I was married for twelve years and I had children, but over the years I was just defeated by depression. My depression was left undiagnosed for too long, and when it finally was, it wasn’t treated well, so the way I look at it is: it was allowed to fester inside me. I jettisoned parts of my life that I could no longer deal with—that took too much time or effort—and eventually I was left with the basic necessities. My illness, my depression, it raped my self-esteem, my ambition, my thirst to live. Over thirty years of paring down my life has taught me that there are very few things that one actually needs.

  Here’s what I need: I need food, drink, and a cozy place to sleep. I need companionship, and it’s fine if it’s digital—I like ESPN better than I like most people. I need to occasionally check in with my kids so that I know that they are okay. And that’s about it. Everything else is very disposable. I used to think I needed the latest gadgets, a nice car, nice clothes for work, enough money for a membership at a country club. But then I think I realized that instead of adding enjoyment to my life, these things were just adding stress. Keeping up with the Joneses is a lot of work when something is broken inside. So I lost everything, little by little, and imagine my surprise when nothing much changed. It was liberating. Solitude is freedom.

  I feel bad for my ex-wife. Being married to me, especially toward the end, must have been very challenging. She tried her best, but my depression dragged both of us down. I wasn’t communicating. I was totally isolating myself from her, and she didn’t know how to get through to me. My generation, we don’t know very much about mental health, and that’s a big disservice to us. I’ve been this way, I’ve struggled with my mental health, for as long as I can remember. It’s not like it hit me in middle age. But it fell through the cracks. I didn’t know how to communicate about it, certainly not with my wife but not with my doctor, either, and so I wrote it off and I put it off. Whether it’s ignorance, machismo, or just a generational thing, I don’t know. But I wasn’t raised to complain, and my own father didn’t believe in doctors and such—unless you were missing a limb, you were likely fine. So by the time I realized something needed to be done, there were casualties: my marriage, my home, the family we’d built.

  I don’t have any responsibilities anymore. I took care of my family financially, I’m self-sufficient, and I’m not doing anyone any harm. My biggest everyday concern is whether I have enough to eat and whether today is the day I will be found dead in my apartment. I don’t have cats, so at least I know I won’t be partially eaten when I’m found. That may sound morbid, but it’s a practical concern for someone like me. So I suppose I’m just waiting around to die. All the men in my family passed away before the age of sixty-two of a heart attack, and I’m sixty-five, so… I guess it could happen at any time, and that’s as scary as it is exciting to me. I had a heart attack a few years ago, but I survived it. I’m a ticking time bomb, you could say. I have a funeral plan that’s all paid for, I have an executor to my will, and I save a little bit of money every month so that I can leave my kids something when I go.

  I take a fistful of pills every day—twenty pills, to be exact—for depression, bipolar disorder, and my heart. They basically bury my sex drive under six feet of concrete, but Viagra still overrides them, sometimes. There’s a woman I know who also struggles with depression, and she’s on a lot of medicine, too. She comes over every once in a while. We make the most out of it. We get out of it
what we can. She’s from Peru. She visits her family there often, and that’s where she gets the Viagra. I guess it’s cheaper there, or something.

  In terms of indulgences, let’s see… I have a pair of furry slippers that I love. I spend all day in those slippers, and the soles are coming off, but they’re mine and I love them. The downstairs neighbor has two dogs that he lets me play with. He and I get along sports-wise. I’m on eBay a lot. I buy myself things that make me briefly feel better—mostly collectibles that aren’t worth anything. It’s not really about the things themselves but about the feeling I get when I’m expecting mail. It’s exciting, a good change in my routine. Retail therapy, as they say. I sell some stuff, too, but that requires a lot of effort—I have to take photos, post it online, etc. It’s too much work, so mostly I end up piling things up in a corner somewhere.

  I am alone a lot, but I don’t really get bored. I watch a lot of television because it helps keep my mind occupied and it’s my lifeline to the outside world. Sometimes I need the rush I get from hearing another voice in the apartment, even if it’s from the television. I need that constant companionship because I just never know when I’ll take a turn. My depression can hit me any time and any place—in the middle of sex—it used to even happen when I was out riding the motorcycle. And I have something the doctors called ultra-rapid cycling bipolar disorder, which is a fancy way of saying that I have very frequent mood changes. There’s only one thing that ends the episode: somewhere between twenty-two to twenty-three hours of being awake during an episode of hypomania, I can force myself to sleep from exhaustion. And then I’m back to plain old depression. It’s like a reset button.